Check This Hand 'Cause I'm Marvelous
by chalantness
Summary: for kingdom of sin. Prompt: Dick knows everybody's tell on the Team, and Zatanna's is by far the cutest / Somehow it isn't surprising that Wally's the one to suggest they play poker.


**Title: **_Check This Hand 'Cause I'm Marvelous__  
_**Rating:** K+  
**Word Count:** 1,600+  
**Characters:** Dick/Zatanna and the Team  
**Summary:** Somehow it isn't surprising that Wally's the one to suggest they play poker.  
**Prompt:** Dick knows everybody's tell on the Team, and Zatanna's is by far the cutest

**For:** kingdom of sin. According to iTunes, I've successfully listened to Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" forty times while writing this. I hope it's at least a little close to what you wanted!

**Check This Hand 'Cause I'm Marvelous**

Somehow it isn't surprising that Wally's the one to suggest they play poker.

But Dick decides to humor him, anyway, since it's the Team's first sleepover at the Cave and he'd rather kick butt at cards instead of watch movies, or whatever else Megan will probably suggest they do because everything she knows about sleepovers came from movies and magazines. So he brings out his new (well, he got it one Christmas and hasn't touched it until now) poker set with clay chips and a waterproof deck, and they throw a bunch of pillows on the floor around the coffee table so it's comfortable to sit.

Megan and Raquel already got started on this gourmet cheesecake recipe they found online and have wanted to try for a while now, and Zatanna promised to help, so it's basically just the guys and Artemis playing right now.

Naturally he's in the lead.

Kaldur has the second biggest pile, though, because he's surprisingly aggressive and really good at bluffing, and he manages to sweep up a lot of chips because he makes it seem like he has an awesome hand. He gets away with this three times before Dick notices the way he subtly shifts his left shoulder before bluffing. It's a very small detail and could very well be insignificant, but he challenges his hand, anyway, and ends up taking the chips this time. Kaldur just smiles like he knows he's been found out.

Wally and Artemis have about the same amount of chips, which irritates Wally because Artemis was never a good liar, but Dick's been working on that with her and she's a lot better now. Her voice still gets just a little higher than usual, but compared to the way Wally scratches the back of his neck when he's trying to lie it's a pretty minor giveaway.

And then there's Conner with the smallest stack, because he's just kind of terrible since he can't bluff to save his life.

When the girls finally come over from the kitchen, they're holding plates of Oreo cheesecake and everyone kind of gets distracted as they settle themselves around the table and make sure everyone gets a slice (or, in Wally's case, his own whole one).

He scoots over a little so that Zatanna can sit down on the same pillow as him, and she feeds him the first bite of her cheesecake.

"Tastes good," he tells her. "You don't want your own?"

"I don't think I can. I've been sneaking Oreo cookies ever since we stated so now I'm stuffed." Even after saying this, though, she's dipping her finger into the whip cream and licking it all off, and he just laughs at her. She grins and shrugs her shoulders. "What? Whip cream is practically nothing."

"Right."

She wipes her finger clean with a napkin, glancing around the table. "What are you playing?"

"Texas Hold 'Em. Here, Take my place," Wally says.

He pushes his chips and over (she's sitting in between him and Dick) to make room for his pie, and Zatanna makes a face. Dick chuckles. "If you need help, just tell me," he assures her, and she gives him this relieved smile then sort of adjusts herself so that he can't see her cards when she picks them up.

They play the hand and Raquel, who took over for Kaldur, ends up winning. Then after Dick wins the next one, Megan sits herself on Conner's lap and says she wants to play, too, so Artemis takes a few minutes to teach her. Zatanna's listening pretty attentively, too, so Dick thinks she may not be too familiar with the game, either.

Except, as he's eating more of his cheesecake and waiting for Artemis to finish explaining, he notices that Zatanna's got three chips in the hand that isn't holding her cards and she's flipping one over the other two with her thumb. It's not a particularly hard trick, but she's doing it over and over again without looking at her hand and not once messing up, like someone who's played poker more than just a handful of times before.

It could very well be a coincidence, because when Zatanna gets bored, she likes teach herself those kinds of one-handed tricks like twirling pens and stuff.

But then they focus on the game again and she totally wins the hand with a pair of twos, and everyone's kind of just staring as she sweeps the large pot towards her.

"What?"

"You made it seem like you never played poker before," Raquel laughs, "and then you just _shark_ us."

"I got lucky," she shrugs. "And I've seen my dad play a few times."

Then she sweeps four more hands in a row, ending up with more chips than Raquel—the second largest pile next to his—and he thinks that it's obviously more than just luck.

He should've known better, though. She's a _magician_. She'd obviously know cards better than the back of her own hand.

He manages to break her streak and wins the next hand. She smiles a little in sort of the same amused way Kaldur had earlier when he'd been found out, except he hasn't figured her out at all and just got lucky. She smiles a little wider when he wins the next hand, and then when she bluffs and wins the hand after that with a pair of sixes, she furrows her eyebrows at him like she's trying to figure out if he let her win or if he really hasn't caught onto her yet.

Artemis manages to win the next hand, and then Megan huffs a little in frustration (she's worse than Conner) and gets up and asks everyone what drinks they want.

Conner goes with her to help her carry everything, and when Artemis gets up to get another slice of cheesecake, Wally tells her to bring back snacks, to which she replies that she's not his maid and them makes him go with her to the kitchen.

Kaldur pulls Raquel onto his lap and they're kind of just laughing and in their own world, so Dick turns to Zatanna and asks, "So, you've watched your dad play a few times?"

"I wasn't lying about that part," she laughs. "I just left out the part where I had a best friend who was obsessed with playing poker. She made all of our friends learn how to play, too, and we'd play for snacks. Our friend's mom made the best brownies and she always had some during lunch, so I wanted those."

"So, you basically mastered poker to win brownies."

"And to win the recipe. You know those dark chocolate brownies I make?" He nods, because _duh_. They're basically the best things, ever. "Those're the ones."

Somehow he's not surprised.

Then Artemis and Conner walk back and sit down again. "Megan and Wally are going to get the blankets and then make snacks for the movie," Artemis tells them, "so Megan says that we should finish up in ten minutes. And that we should think about what we want to watch."

Dick sighs. Well, at least they managed to stall for almost two hours.

Raquel takes the next hand and then Zatanna takes the one after, and that's when Dick finally sees it.

Zatanna licks the corner of her lips right before bluffing. It's not the first time tonight that she's done it, either, but she'd kept stealing whip cream from his cheesecake and he figured that she was just licking some parts that she missed off of her lips. He watches her as Raquel deals, and she does it again and ends up winning that hand, too.

He should've known her tell would be the cutest, if not most distracting, out of everyone.

When Megan and Wally get back, Wally's holding these giant plastic basins filled with snacks and Megan sets the blankets onto the couch and frowns.

"It's the last hand," Conner promises.

"Then you guys should make it interesting," Wally suggests.

Dick smirks. He can always count on Wally work in his favor, even if the guy is completely unaware of it. "Like what?" Dick asks. "Whoever wins gets to pick the movie?"

"Sounds like fun," Raquel says.

He's watching Zatanna as she looks at her cards and it's impressive how unreadable she is. No wonder it took a while for him to figure her out. He glances around at everyone else and he pretty much knows that they don't have anything, so he turns back to Zatanna and notices the way her tongue swipes over her bottom lip before she bites down a little.

And that's all the confirmation he needs to know he's won. Zatanna doesn't look all that surprised, either, and Megan pouts about wanting to watch something romantic.

"It's a good thing we didn't play for real money," Zatanna tells him as she's collecting all the cards. "You're rich enough as it is."

He laughs.

He picks _Fast Five_ because it's one of the only ones he really likes out of the selection and because he knows Megan will like the side romances and all of them coming together and being a team, so at least there's a little bit of everything in there. They move the coffee table out of the way and inflate the air mattress for Kaldur and Raquel, since Conner and Megan are on the couch with Wally and Artemis on the sectional and he and Zatanna on the futon (because they're the only two small enough to lie there comfortably).

Zatanna's watching the previews while biting into her 70% dark chocolate bar, and when her tongue darts out to lick the corner of her mouth, he chuckles and she looks at him.

"What?"

"I'll play you for that."


End file.
